nuclear weapons

1945: 6 August, Hiroshima; 9 August, Nagasaki

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Seventy nine years ago, twice and never since then, nuclear weapons were used in war. One bomb on Hiroshima, one bomb on Nagasaki. Blast, fire and radiation killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people in Hiroshima and from 60,000 to 80,000 in Nagasaki. Those are the estimated figures for deaths by the end of 1945; there have been additional deaths since as a result of radiation-caused cancers.

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki serves as reminder of what US President and wartime commander Dwight D Eisenhower called “that awful thing” can do. It reminds us that hostile rhetoric and throwaway remarks about using nuclear weapons are inhumanly irresponsible.

NB: Eisenhower, like almost all the most senior US military commanders of the time, believed using the nuclear bombs on Japan was unnecessary and ineffective; it was not the atomic bombing that persuaded Japan to surrender, they concluded, but the Soviet offensive in Manchuria.

2022: the pear-shaped year

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I hope my levity does not make it seem as if I am dismissing the human reality of the horrors we have witnessed in 2022 or downplaying the seriousness of the events and their implications. But it is the way I express my assessment of the year in a brief interview filmed and disseminated as part of SIPRI’s Peace Points series.

It has been a year of war, crisis, the impact of climate change, growing hunger in poorer countries, and increased cost of living everywhere – rich and poor countries alike. And it came on the back of three years of pandemic for most of the world and a fourth year for China.

There is no point in sugaring the pill. The upshot is that this has been a bad year for peace and security . The only way we can figure out how to deal with all of that is to face it head-on with eyes open. Here’s the film.

The bright spot is that more people are paying attention. That’s the starting point for something better.

War and nature

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War is not glorious. As we see this year in Ukraine, Ethiopia and almost 50 other continuing wars and armed conflicts, people are killed and, some of us, ordered to kill. People are maimed, terrified, forced into hiding and flight, and traumatised. Even without what are known as war crimes – such as torture, kidnapping, killing civilians whether close up or from long range – war is, as a US Civil War General said, hell.

And after the war? The effects of destruction are lasting because the natural environment is all too often another casualty of armed conflicts.

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Indicators of our current insecurity

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Global insecurity today is shaped by the combination of an environmental crisis, in which climate change is prominent but by no means the only element, and a darkening security horizon. These twin crises are linked: each worsens the other so steps to address them can and should also be linked.

Nature and peace: damage one, damage the other; protect one, enhance the other.

To identify possible remedies for the global malady, we need to understand the intersection of problems and issues. But it may be useful to begin by looking at the components. After all, insecurity is not just one thing, nor is the environmental crisis. There are diverse indicators of each.

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Peace and security overview of 2020: the year when things didn’t get better or worse

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Histories of 2020 will start with the Covid-19 pandemic and there will probably be a lot about the US presidential election. Both the pandemic and the election have big implications for peace and security in 2021 and further ahead. Despite Covid, on the security horizon, 2020 was different from the three preceding years: at last, things didn’t get worse. It doesn’t sound like much but given how badly global security had deteriorated, it was an important, refreshing and much needed change.

Unfortunately, things didn’t get better either. But read on.

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Extending New START

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So Joe Biden, as anticipated, has moved quickly to arrange with Russia the extension of the New START bilateral nuclear arms control agreement. Signed in 2010, taking effect in 2011, and due to expire on 5 February this year, the treaty permits extension for up to five years by mutual consent.

The good people at Deutsche Welle asked me the two key questions – “Is this good news?” “Why”? And let me answer them on their 8 o’clock bulletin yesterday evening.

For a more extended discussion, Jan Eliasson and I put out our thoughts earlier this week. In brief, as I argued in my previous post, in a tough period with a complex set of issues, the approach on arms control of the new US President is welcome. He faces some demanding tasks. And the first signs are positive.

Arms control in 2021

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There are so many crucial items on the global agenda that one struggles to keep up (though I do wonder whether there really are more now than there used to be or does it just feel that way?). Covid-19 and its economic consequences, the likely increase in extreme poverty and hunger, climate change and the rest of the compound environmental crisis, the attack on democracy in the world’s richest and most powerfully armed state, rising inequality, toxic geopolitics, intractable armed conflicts. And more. This does not seem to be a happy age that we are living through.

In this (rather lengthy) post, I focus on prospects for arms control in 2021. The big challenge is how to make progress against such an unpromising backdrop.

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The US withdrawal from the Iran deal: one year on

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On 8 May last year, US President Trump announced that the United States would pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which sets limits on Iran’s nuclear programme to ensure that it cannot produce nuclear weapons. Despite the US withdrawal, the JCPOA remains in force. Today, however, Iranian state TV reported that, while remaining in the JCPOA, Iran is planning to resume some nuclear activities that were ceased under the agreement. Continue reading →

The Hanoi summit – first thoughts

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It is not easy to read the runes of the Hanoi summit between the US and North Korean leaders, President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un. A lot of western press has dubbed it a failure but that is not enough to understand what is going on. Continue reading →

Arms control: scanning the landscape

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Even before President Trump announced the USA would withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 (see my last blog post on this), the arms control landscape did not present a happy picture. Experts from SIPRI and from the Russian Institute, IMEMO, met in October and discussed the problem. The occasion marked the 25th anniversary of the SIPRI Yearbook being published in Russian, thanks to translation effected through IMEMO, together with a Russian supplement produced by IMEMO. We captured some of the key themes in this short film in SIPRI’s Spotlight series.